In our ongoing series of interviews with publishers who are keeping comics history alive, we go oversized this week. Since it started publishing reprints of classic newspaper comics 20 years ago with Little Nemo, Sunday Press reimagined what a reprint could be. These massively oversized books try to immerse us in the original scale and rich color of the earliest Sunday pages. Sunday Press has applied its format to Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, Milt Gross, Gasoline Alley, among others. Peter Maresca is founder of Sunday Press Books. We spent an hour with Peter recently recalling his background in comics and tech, the origins of Sunday Press Books with the Little Nemo project, and his thoughts on keeping comics history relevant for a new generation of readers and creators.

In addition to pristine restorations and gorgeous production values, Sunday Press books are all about Peter’s smart curation. He has resurfaced forgotten visual treats like Lil Joe and White Boy. In the recent revision of his indispensable anthology, Society is Nix, the selections form a genuine argument about the historical importance of the newspaper strip’s first 15 years of anarchic violence and radical experimentation.

In Sunday Press’ recent partnership with Fantagraphics we now get to enjoy bigger print runs and wider distribution of these Sunday Press books.

We recently reviewed the revised edition of Sunday Press’s Society is Nix here.

The full video interview with Peter is below or on YouTube.